FireMage on 1/12/2018 at 11:12
City mission are always cool since there are so many ways to create a quarter and gives it an identity, a personnality. And it is a good kind of mission where you can setup some secret, side sorties, cool random stuff happening.
But there are also things that I don't really enjoy with it as well.
The thing I don't like the most with city mission is the next one : when you can't see if the npcs are hostile or friendly. If in some missions it's told to the player pretty quickly, in other it's not that obvious unless you meet the first guard who will attack or not attack you on sight.
Anyway, aside this thing, I oftenly enjoy most of them since city missions are those who offers the numberest different path to reach your goal like Front Door, back door, windows, rooftops, sewers... so many possibilites that makes the game very enjoyable when it's well done. :)
Marzec on 1/12/2018 at 11:32
For me, it's hard to give a general like or dislike on the city genre. I think it's doable to create a city fan mission which does not have all negative factors you all mention. It's up to the author to release a playable mission.
But I accept the fact that someone might just don't like city type missions. That's okay, everybody is free to have their own taste and favourite themes.
However, if I need to share my humble personal opinion, some of problems mentioned above are a bit ... self-made. It's both author's problem and your problem if the number of possible tracks in the mission is to big for you. First, the author is responsible for creating a ongoing gameplay, meaning it should not be a repetative gameplay, where you visit the same street for the 5th time and you have no idea where you should head to. Second, its your own problem if you really need to check every single corner and every roof you see makes you think about it and visualise the building content.
I think there are different kinds of players. Some of them like to get every single loot and read all texts, the other are okay with just ticking objective list and getting the general plot. The first group often includes ghost players.
To sum up, I think we have some really good city missions, but it's relatively easy to make a city mission that has weak gameplay. On the other hand it's really hard to resist from the need of checking every location. There always is a possibility to miss some interesting plot or other valuable content. Fortunatelly, at least for me, it's easy to decide what to do :D Those are fan-made products, so I can not throw them away easily - usually when I play I try to maximize the exploration factor as much as possible and other missions are sitting there and waiting in a long queue... I wonder if I would need to learn a new approach for our pack of contest missions.
john9818a on 4/12/2018 at 06:59
I wrote a long post but then Google Play decided to shut down Chrome before I could submit my post. :mad:
To summarize, I agree with bbb and nicked in that city missions are hard to make considering how varied the buildings have to be to keep them from being boring. Mansion missions can use the same motif throughout though. Personally I'm not an architect and I don't live in or near a city that would give me inspiration for my city missions, so I basically have to use other missions including OMs for direction on how to design buildings.
Sometimes authors choose to have buildings act as walls because a walk itself would be boring, and there might be limited resources that are needed elsewhere. There might also be technical issues where the author had no choice but to leave some buildings very simple. Also getting too far off track can cause confusion or cause the player to forget what he/she was doing before going on a tangent.
When I design city missions I start with the least amount of detail on each building across the map just to a feel for how big the map is going to be, and then increase the detail equally across the map in each building so that the detail work is consistent from one building to the next. Balancing resources in this respect makes building city missions even more difficult, and sometimes leads to buildings or entire sections of the map being scraped in favor of less complicated architecture.
One last thing I would like to point out is that pretty much every city missions is placed with the confines of a wall or a perimeter of buildings. This is because in the Thief video game world there is no way to implement infinite horizons that look convincing nor is there loading terrain as you move like some newer games.
zajazd on 4/12/2018 at 07:44
Verticality
Judith on 4/12/2018 at 07:59
It's hard to design a city mission with personality. In most games this is a filler, designed to make you busy. I see that in missions too, with generic places to explore, and lockpicking made longer without any real source of tension, just to bump up the time statistics. But, designing mansions or other certain places (banks, houses, churches, castles) is even harder, because you need to have access to floor plans, or at least you need a vague idea how to build a place that will resemble such location in meaningful way. It's a place where architectural knowledge and level design meet. On the other hand, cityscapes can be more abstract and incoherent, and the real life references are easier to come by.
Goethe's Ghost on 4/12/2018 at 12:45
I believe when "Assassins" was released, we fell in love with what was possible. "Lord Bafford's Manor" introduced us to it, but Assassins was the first mission to switch up objectives and put forth a very twisting experience with the numerous pathways. Immersion for the period with Garrett sneaking up on his would be killers. Your heart was racing, and you were really involved. It's still a great, immersive mission in many ways. It's probably even more immersive with the HD mod combined with the "Ultimate Difficulty" for Thief 1 HD.
P.S. Shacky - Those cathedral screenshots are very pleasing to the eye. Good job!
